her to a flat rock a few steps away.  She followed him, keeping her eyes on him in a wondering sort of way.  The grizzly’s reddish eyes were on David.  A few yards away Baree was lying flat on his belly between two stones, his eyes on the bear.  It was a strange scene and rather weirdly incongruous.  David no longer sensed it.  He still held the girl’s hand as he seated her on the rock, and he looked into her eyes, smiling confidently.  She was, after all, his little chum—­the Girl who had been with him ever since that first night’s vision in Thoreau’s cabin, and who had helped him to win that great fight he had made; the girl who had cheered and inspired him during many months, and whom he had come fifteen hundred miles to see.  He told her this.  At first she possibly thought him a little mad.  Her eyes betrayed that suspicion, for she uttered not a word to break in on his story; but after a little her lips parted, her breath came a little more quickly, a flush grew in her cheeks.  It was a wonderful thing in her life, this story, no matter if the man was a bit mad, or even an impostor.  He at least was very real in this moment, and he had told the story without excitement, and with an immeasurable degree of confidence and quiet tenderness—­as though he had been simplifying the strange tale for the ears of a child, which in fact he had been endeavouring to do; for with the flush in her cheeks, her parted lips, and her softening eyes, she looked to him more like a child now than ever.  His manner gave her great faith.  But of course she was, deep in her trembling soul, quite incredulous that he should have done all these things for her—­incredulous until he ended his story with that day’s travel up the valley, and then, for the first time, showed to her—­as a proof of all he had said—­the picture.

She gave a little cry then.  It was the first sound that had broken past her lips, and she clutched the picture in her hands and stared at it; and David, looking down, could see nothing but that shining disarray of curls, a rich and wonderful brown, in the sunlight, clustering about her shoulders and falling thickly to her waist.  He thought it indescribably beautiful, in spite of the manner in which the curls and tresses had tangled themselves.  They hid her face as she bent over the picture.  He did not speak.  He waited, knowing that in a moment or two all that he had guessed at would be clear, and that when the girl looked up she would tell him about the picture, and why she happened to be here, and not with the woman of the coach, who must have been her mother.

When at last she did look up from the picture her eyes were big and staring and filled with a mysterious questioning.

David, feeling quite sure of himself, said: 

“How did it happen that you were away up here, and not with your mother that night when I met her on the train?”

“She wasn’t my mother,” replied the girl, looking at him still in that strange way.  “My mother is dead.”